Marriage and Family in a Virtual World

In
a virtual world, people will want to create virtual institutions—virtual
partnerships, corporations and marriages—so that they can share virtual (and
possibly real) assets. This raises a whole slew of issues. Among them are how
to implement these partnerships, virtual property rights, eligible marriage
partners, virtual children, limits to reproduction, etc. This paper mainly addresses
virtual marriages, virtual property transfers after virtual or actual death,
and family relationships in Virtual Reality (VR), with an emphasis on issues
raised by the creation and raising of virtual children.

1.Why Might We Need Virtual Reality?

Before
addressing the issues raised by virtual relationships, it is necessary to
consider why anyone would want to have them in the first place. After all, some
might argue that it is ridiculous to shift our relationships out of real space
and into virtual space. Many people might become so isolated from reality that
our society as a whole will suffer. One might imagine a world where everyone
looks perfect in VR and will be embarrassed to be seen in public because they
cannot compare to their virtual selves. If it is impossible to get any physical
exercise in VR, then it might become normal for people who spend most of their
time in VR to become immobile due to lack of physical strength and morbid
obesity. Emergency workers may have to become accustomed to having to remove
walls when removing the bodies of dead VR addicts.[1]
In spite of advances in medicine, we may see a surge of people ignoring their
health and dying earlier than necessary, simply because they are too immersed
in their virtual lives to take care of their health in the real world. We could
also see a new form of anorexia, where people are too occupied with VR to
remember to eat.

On
the other hand, advanced VR systems might include taste and smell interfaces
while allowing intravenous feeding of advanced foods that extend life, coupled
with nanomachines that care for the body and machines that exercise the limbs
to keep the body fit. This would eliminate the physical problems that might
arise from living in a virtual world (and probably substantially reduce deaths
from accidental injury.) But it might not address the social problems that
might arise from people never actually physically interacting with each other
in real situations.

However,
one could imagine a variety of scenarios where VR is a useful construct. For
instance, some people may only exist in VR (disembodied artificial
intelligences (AIs) or humans who avoid death by transferring their
consciousnesses into virtual worlds[2])
or have no ability to function in the real world (aware but unable to interact
in real world.[3]) Some people
may simply prefer to live in VR, maybe because they areugly or misshapen in real world[4]—or
maybe because they have handicaps which are inconvenient in the real world, but
non existent in VR. For instance, in a world where VR has a direct brain
interface, deafness, blindness, missing limbs, and other physical defects may
not exist at all.

Alternately,
if our society becomes highly risk adverse, then virtual reality might become a
preference. In a time of super-plagues or nano-weapons, people may seal
themselves in protected environments and only interact virtually. Other grim
future scenarios include ecological disasters, where no one can leave their
shelters, or famines where the only available food tastes too bad to actually
eat—but where you can have anything you want to eat in VR while having machines
feed you goop that you never actually have to taste.[5]

What
if our society becomes dispersed throughout the solar system (or multiple solar
systems)? VR could be a solution to alleviate the isolation that might come
from long periods of isolation in remote outposts or long space
voyages—especially if we somehow figure out how to avoid the long latency times
caused by ultra long distance communication.

Other
uses of VR might be for convicted criminals, who are too dangerous to allow to
interact with people in reality, but harmless in VR, or aliens who interact at
different time rates or who are just too scary-looking to be dealt with in
their true forms.

Another
possible use of VR is for people who have been cryonically preserved, assuming
that brain function remains at some much slower rate. A VR world populated
entirely by cryonically-slowed individuals would offer an opportunity for
people to have virtual lives while waiting to be cured and restored to actual
reality. Another possibility is that cryonically preserved people might
download their brains into VR while waiting for a cure in the real world, with
the intention of transferring the virtual experiences back to the real body
when their real body is ready.[6]
This scenario also works for long starship voyages where the virtual world is
the starship’s computer and the crew’s real bodies are in suspended animation
during the voyage.

2.Relationships in Virtual Reality

Having
established that there are possible scenarios where virtual reality might be a
useful substitute for actual reality, we can move onto the issues raised by
life in a virtual world. For instance—do we want to transfer real-world
institutions into VR? Given that, in many of the scenarios discussed in the
last section, VR has become a substitute for actual reality, it seems that we
would want to do just that. But it is obvious that many of the limitations of
the real world will simply not apply in VR. Some examples: Many “people” in VR
may be immortal; Real Property as a concept will have a completely different
meaning; Virtual “children” may come into existence by non-biological means;
Real world governmental institutions may be inappropriate or completely
ineffectual in VR; “Death” as a concept will have to be redefined; Since some
portions of Virtual worlds may experience time at different rates, concepts of
time will have to be broadened; The issue of slavery will have to be revisited;
and new problems may arise from population control pressures.

3.Virtual
Marriage

The
focus of this discussion is on virtual marriage and families—including possible
mechanisms for administrating virtual estates, raising children and various
forms of alternate marriage that may work in a virtual society.

Virtual
Marriage is probably one institution that will be desirable to implement in any
deep virtual reality society, especially when considering the transfer of
wealth after death, sharing of virtual properties during life, and to aid in
the raising of virtual children. It might not be too useful in the raising of
real children, however, since the process is probably better executed in the
real world in any but the most extreme environmental conditions, in cases of
great distance, or in cases of a severely physically impaired family members.
If there is a usable real world and none of the participants are anonymous or
non-corporeal, standard models of marriage will probably be sufficient.
However, as soon as any one of the family members is unable to function outside
of VR, then there will have to be a way to care for those who must remain in VR
for their entire existence.

Virtual
Marriage is also a potentially useful concept in a world of strong privacy. Say
you have built up a large bank account that is completely untraceable to you.
What happens when you die? It is pretty obvious that probate won’t help you
pass your money onto your descendents, so an alternative means of passing money
after death is desirable.

Implementing
the actual mechanism for marriage is probably the smallest part of the
problem—it will probably be no more complicated than getting a marriage license
is in the real world. Alternate marriage types, such as line marriages,[7] domestic partnerships and group
marriages may be implemented as well, depending on the mores and values of the
virtual environment.

Complications
arise when dealing with issues of identity and life status, however. In a
virtual world, it becomes very difficult to verify that the person you have
married is actually one person, or is the sex you think he his, whether he is
married in some other world, or even if he is human. If VR is tied to the real
world by means of public keys[8],
for instance, there is no guarantee that the virtual person you are interacting
with isn’t actually an impostor who has stolen your spouse’s identity (giving a
whole new spin on the meaning of “identity theft”.) In order for virtual
societies to function properly, then, it will be necessary to implement a stronger
system for verifying identity.

One
can conceive of various ways to identify a person in VR. If the person is a
flesh and blood human, then some combination of DNA, voiceprint, retinal scans
or other biological identifiers, along with some form of implant technology
might serve to act as a mostly foolproof identification system. The system will
have to be universal, however, or people may have identities on various
networks—although this might not be a bad thing, depending on your view—and
universal genetic or biological registration raises many privacy issues. It
becomes more complicated if you want to identify an artificial intelligence,
however, especially if that AI is not unique. It is possible that the network
could take a “snapshot” of the AI’s code at some point in time and use that in
place of a genetic database entry, or maybe use some variation of a
public/private key system based upon the time of the AI’s registration with the
network.

Either
of these identification systems might be considered invasive to one’s privacy.
Another method might involve registering the inhabitant’s DNA along with some
anonymous identifier upon initial entry into the virtual world and only
allowing a network login to that identity from the proper real person. This will
only work properly if there is only one virtual world—once again a single
person could have an identity in any world that is unconnected to the others
where identities have been established.

Other
science fiction-type identifications might be possible, such as brainwave
patterns or non-transferable implants for real humans, or hardware keys for AIs
(kept in a central repository.)

Once
issues of identity are resolved, there needs to be a legal and/or physical way
to determine the status of the spouse—is he alive or dead? Maybe the operative
words here will have to be “active” or “inactive” rather than living or dead,
since it may become really complicated to define life when AIs enter the
picture.

In
order to determine death, there must be some monitoring or registration system
in place. One way to keep your real identity secret in the real world while
maintaining a virtual self would be to leave instructions in your real world
will specifying that, upon your death, a biological sample (or your network implant)
must be sent to a repository along with medical proof of your death. The
depository doesn’t know who you are, but has a biological sample matching your
virtual identity. The doctor knows who you are, but does not include your name
with the sample (or some intermediary strips the name from the sample as a
matter of course.) This way, no one has all the information needed to tie your
real self to your virtual self.

It
may be that you have no need to keep your real and virtual selves separate, so
in that case, the technician or doctor who removes your body from your VR
interface equipment can report your death to the network when you die. If you
die while outside of VR, then your will can specify, as part of finalizing your
affairs, that the network needs to be notified of your death.

If
you are in VR because you are alone in deep space somewhere, or if it is
somehow impossible to determine or reach your physical location, the network
must have some way of monitoring the condition of your ship or your equipment,
and might report you dead upon the destruction of either.

If
you are an AI, it is likely that you have an actual physical location (a
server, ford instance). Your death could occur if your server goes offline and
you do not have arrangements to reincorporate elsewhere (say, a backup server.)
This will not work if AIs can move from server to server. In that case, the
network will need to have some means of monitoring your “process”. If your
process is killed—then you are dead—at least until you are restored from a
backup. There will have to be some kind of reasonable time period for you to
restore yourself or some means of verifying permanent death—but unless there is
some physical piece of hardware that defines you as an AI, then there will always
be some doubt as to your “death.”

Other
ways of determining death might be to monitor network activity. The network
might decide you are dead if you have no activity on the network for some
period of time (akin to missing person’s law, where you are presumed dead if no
one has heard from you for 7 or more years, for example). There might be some
protections built into the system which put some of your assets into trust for
some longer period of time, just in case you appear after a long absence (maybe
a universal trust fund for people who fall though the cracks in the protection
scheme for some reason.)

In
any case, any report of your death should be announced on the network and in
the real world so that you and people who know you have the opportunity to dispute
your death, if necessary.[9]

Once
issues of identity and life status can be worked out, it remains to work out
the mechanics of marriage in a virtual world. Getting a marriage license will
probably require a biological sample, network process identifier, public key,
or some combination thereof. The union can then be registered on the network,
much like a real world marriage license becomes a public document. Once
registration is complete, then whatever rights and responsibilities that
accompany the marriage commitment will vest.

4.Virtual Property

The
best legal reason to register a marriage is so that the partners can obtain
some legal benefit, such as health insurance (to care for your server or your
real body), life insurance, and wealth or property transfer at death. This
raises the issue of virtual property rights, which are beyond the scope of this
paper, but should be at least mentioned in passing. There are two types of
property that you might want to pass at death: network equipment and servers,
and virtual property, including money and virtual real property. Real property,
like servers, will probably be passed in the real world, unless you have it
hidden from real world ownership conventions (say, by anonymous ownership which
has been registered in a virtual world.) If, like in Neal Stephenson’s Snow
Crash for instance,[10]
there is such a thing as valuable and permanent real estate, then you will want
to control where it goes after your death. Maybe you don’t have any relatives
in VR, or maybe you don’t want them to know that you have a virtual life as
well as a real life.

If,
like most people in the real world, you don’t have a will, you may still want
to keep your virtual and real assets apart, especially if you have an
“anonymous” virtual persona. If you have only a real world spouse, then maybe
you want everything to go to him, but what if you have a virtual spouse (or
children) as well? Along with virtual marriage comes virtual families and,
quite possibly, virtual probate. Other issues raised by virtual families
include child custody after divorce, which probably will mirror real world
law—except in non-traditional marriages, where new rules will have to be
developed.

Virtual
marriage is the best way to perfectthese virtual property rights and to care for your virtual family after
death.

5.Alternatives
to Traditional Marriage

Marriage
options in the real world are limited as of today to two partner male/female
unions. There is no reason why this has to be the case in virtual worlds. In
fact, some virtual worlds may be created entirely to escape the social
limitations of the real world. There is also no reason that a partners in a
virtual marriage have to both have a virtual presence (maybe one person has no
interest in living in a virtual world, but at least some of the other person’s
assets exist there—the marriage could be registered in VR such that the virtual
intestacy scheme will not trump the real spouse’s rights in the virtual assets.

Ideally
a virtual world would allow for line marriages, group marriages, unions of AI,
non-human, and human partners, and open same-sex unions. Deep VR could allow
for seamless interactions among disparate entities, without the physical/social
complications that might arise in the real world.

Line
marriages[11] would be
particularly useful in virtual worlds where it is impossible to produce virtual
children. It also works in worlds where you can have children, but don’t want
to dilute the holdings of your marriage by continually splitting and
resplitting the shares of the property. In a line marriage, there are husbands
and wives of various levels of seniority (depending on the time since joining),
and new, usually younger spouses are invited in periodically to keep the line
going. All property belongs to the marriage (each has an undivided interest in
the whole) and not to their children (in a real world line-marriage—in this
case there are no children). As long as one spouse is still alive, the property
does not pass on to the children.

Group
marriages (polygamy/polyandry) allow for maximum pooling of resources but
suffer from the problem of marriage property being divided whenever a spouse
dies.

A
new twist on traditional and nontraditional marriages will occur whenever one
or more of the partners in the marriage is not human, artificial, or formerly
human. VR allows this, obviously, since the virtual projection of self does not
have to reflect any actual physical characteristics of the original person,
including life status (assuming there was an original person.) If an AI is
sufficiently attractive emotionally to another being, whether human or AI, then
physical appearance can be altered to suit the relationship.

It
is likely that other types of marriage will be invented in new worlds,
including maybe some forms of hive-mind, or “telepathic” gestalts.

6.Children

The
most interesting issue raised by virtual marriages is that of virtual children.
The interesting questions arise, not when considering real children who can
exist outside of VR, but children who only exist in VR.

Real
children who cannot function outside of VR are only moderately interesting,
since they have real bodies and will have genetic ties to real people. It is
conceivable that a child could spend his entire life in VR, but laws analogous
to the marriage laws discussed above would serve to protect them much like in
the real world.

Of
greater interest are “children” who are created in VR. A virtual child could be
an artificial intelligence made from scratch, a digital copy of a real child, a
digital copy of an adult modified somehow to be childlike, a fusion of one or
more of the above, or an AI specifically designed to be childlike.[12]
In any of these cases, the virtual child has no existence outside of VR and is
thus fully dependent on its parents, whether real or artificial.

Whether
a child is an “off the shelf” model, or custom made using elements taken from
real or artificial humans, there will probably need to be some rules on how to
handle them, how to care for them. However, this discussion is only interesting
if these children are considered alive and worthy of the protection of the law.
If a virtual child is just a complicated simulation—basically a glorified
version of a 1990’s era Tamagotchi[13]
(a virtual pet you kept on a key chain), then it seems pretty clear that there
is no reason to worry about wealth transfer, slave labor or the right of the
program to exist. If the program has legal rights as a living entity, then
rules will need to be created in order to protect it.

The
starting point for virtual children’s rights is some kind of registration
system. When someone wants to create a child, he will have to petition to bring
the child into existence and then register its process, hardware key, etc. (see
discussion of life status above.) The virtual world administration might
require that the prospective parent have a license to produce the child in the
first place. A license might be based on merit, so “incompetent” parents will
be filtered out at the outset. The parent will then have to assume parental
responsibilities in order to gain parental rights. The network might have a
mechanism for monitoring virtual children until (or if) they reach adulthood
status. Alternately, each child might be required to have, as part of its
interface with the network, a mechanism for reporting abuse. Like in the real
world, abuse of a virtual child might be remedied by removing the child from
its parent. Caring for abused virtual children might only consist of altering a
portion of its code so that it becomes an adult and can take care of itself
(commercial models will probably have this built-in), or allowing people who
can’t afford to create virtual children to adopt. An interesting complication
arises if the server that houses the child belongs to the person who originally
created the child—making it necessary to have a mechanism to either confiscate
the hardware or somehow move the child to another server. It might be that, as
a prerequisite for creating the child in the first place, the hardware upon
which the program runs must be physically located in a place where the parent
has no physical control—that way legal authority will be able to transfer the
child to another server without having to confiscate any physical property
(other than a hardware key, if one exists) and will not run afoul of
constitutional issues involving an unlawful taking. This option looks to be
expensive for the governing authority, raising issues of how to fund the
activity of government sponsored child protection. Note that this problem is
minimized if an AI can be transferred between servers without any expenses
beyond bandwidth, storage space, and processing power. Someone will still have
to pay for it, but that might be taken care of by VR usage fees. Another
solution might be to put the virtual child into storage—turning him off until
someone decides that they want to create a child and is willing to pay the fees
required to reactivate him. As an incentive, maybe the administrators of the
virtual world will offer a substantial discount on reactivating a virtual child
that has been placed in storage.

The
whole idea of putting a child into storage raises another interesting issue—if
you get tired of your kid, can you just put him into storage until you are
ready to deal with him again? It depends. If the child has social interactions
with other AIs, then prolonged deactivation might be cruel—the child might miss
important events in the lives of others or return after a prolonged absence to
find his childhood friends have outgrown him or his grandparents have died. At
the other extreme, if the child knows no one outside of a single parent, then
it is arguable that there is no harm in deactivation (beyond the child’s
knowledge that he is not valuable enough to be kept running at all times.)

It
might also be interesting to consider legal consequences of “killing” an AI
child, but that issue is beyond the scope of this paper.

The
next interesting issue regarding virtual children is numbers—should there be a
limit? If there is a limit, what should it be? Say a person can afford to have
ten thousand children and the network can support them. Say further that the
parent wants all the children to be identical and uniformly bizarre looking and
annoying, or worse, sporting Coca Cola emblems where their heads should
be—leading to a proliferation of children that only a parent could love[14].
Should the virtual world administration prevent this from happening? The
problem might be even worse if no hardware is required to house the child (i.e.
the child can exist on the network without its own server.) Without a
registration system and parental responsibilities, this action might lead to
“spamming” a virtual world with children. A solution might be to allow only one
copy of a particular AI on the network at any one time. Further, we might
require a parent to be an individual, rather than a corporation. A more
practical solution might be to require a parent to be responsible for the
actions of his progeny, thus providing a big disincentive to producing more
children than you are capable of supervising.

Parental
responsibilities might include tort responsibility, educational requirements,
or bandwidth charges (programs require resources and resources cost money.) An
alternate, but draconian, solution might be allowing the network police to
deactivate any child left unsupervised for long periods at will. Popular
opinion might be enough to keep parents in line—after all, who wants to be
known as the guy who fathered a thousand annoying children?

One
final issue regarding virtual children is growing up. If an AI is designed to
be a child, it may never grow up—but what happens when the child’s parent dies
or decides that he doesn’t want to care for a child anymore? As discussed
above, it may be that a commercial child AI will have a software switch that
causes it to become an adult whenever the parent wants it to do so. If a child
is required to be licensed at birth, then it is possible that a requirement for
licensing is a similar software switch. It is more interesting if both
commercial and non commercial AIs simply grow and develop into adults—it is
likely that most people who create AIs in the first place will want to
experience the growth of a child AI into an adult. The problem here is that it
is likely that child AIs will develop at different and highly unpredictable
rates. There will have to be some kind of mechanism for determining at what
point a child AI may become an adult. An interesting side issue is whether it
might be legal to force an AI to remain a child against its will (or program it
so it has no desire to grow up.)

One
way of determining adulthood in AIs might be through some form of educational
system—when the AI completes school it becomes an adult. Other ways might
include adulthood exams or possibly an evaluation whenever the AI decides it is
time to end its childhood.

7.Final Thoughts

Virtual
marriage might be a useful institution in virtual worlds, but it probably will
not replace real world marriage except in fairly extreme situations like in a
world of AIs and human-to-software conversions or in the case of disasters that
make actual reality unlivable. Of course, this assumption is made from the
point of view of someone who has never experienced deep VR—maybe life in VR
will be some much better than real life that it would be stupid to live
anywhere else. If living in VR extends life or allows experiences that are so
wonderful that actual reality pales in comparison, maybe it will be considered
normal rather than extreme.

Endnotes

[1] See the case of
a 600 lb man having heard problems and the trials of the crew trying to save
him. “The Bravest” home page, available at http://www.hearstent.com/html/Bravest/bravest_Episodic1.html#600LB

[2] For a science
fiction account of such a scenario, see Tad Williams’ Otherland series, where a huge computer network is built to
house the personalities of the world’s richest people. See www.tadwilliams.com.

[3] For example,
the character of Orlando, in the first book of the Otherland series, was born with a terminal disease and has
never been able to leave his bed. Tad Williams, City of Golden Shadow, New American Library, 1998, ISBN# 0886777631.

[4] But note
that the concept of ugliness may change dramatically once people become used to
having perfect bodies in VR and begin to forget that real bodies are not
perfect.

[5] See, for
instance, the Joe Pantoliano’s character, Cypher, in The Matrix, Warner Brothers, 1999, sells out his friends for
the chance to reenter a virtual world that seems, to him, far better than the
real world. In one scene, he relishes an opportunity to eat a steak, something
that he simply could not get in the real world for any price.